Quotes About Technology

Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral." This is certainly true in the kitchen. Tools are not neutral objects. They change with changing social context. A mortar and pestle was a different thing for the Roman slave forced to pound up highly amalgamated mixtures for hours on end for his master's enjoyment than it is for me: a pleasing object with which I make pesto for fun, on a whim.

It is what happens whenever a machine replaces the labor of an artisan: the artisan's skills become devalued.

We often overattribute efficiency to the technologies we are accustomed to.

what we are prepared to accept in the way of the technology of eating is often determined more by cultural forces than function.

The canning industry, which was growing by the day, made considerable use of additives: saccharine to make corn sweeter, copper to make peas greener, and all sorts of preservatives to stop meat from going off.

She luxuriated in these disembodied telephone conversations. "Darling, I can almost see you, almost touch you now." It was intimate yet distant; thrilling yet safe.

A guy should never underestimate the power of a well-placed jet

Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole.

Once the telephone had been invented, it was only a matter of time before the police got in on the new technology and, first in Glasgow and then in London, the police box was born. Here a police officer in need of assistance could find a telephone link to Scotland Yard, a dry space to do "paperwork" and, in certain extreme cases, a life of adventure through space and time.

The mark was from the glue that once held a folder into which a library card would have fitted back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the earth and computers were the size of washing machines.

I didn't tell him that it was all stored as binary information on rapidly spinning shiny discs, partly because I'd have to look up the details myself, but mostly because by the time he'd understood the technology it would have been replaced by something else.

I suspected Molly wanted the pictures to send to her friends on Twitter and Facebook, the ones that I was not supposed to know about. I didn't dare ask because we have an unspoken agreement—I don't question what she does on my computer when I'm out and, in return, she doesn't murder me in my sleep. Back

The world was different before the war,' he said. 'We didn't have this instantaneous access to information that your generation has. The world was a bigger, more mysterious place - we still dreamed of secret caves in the Mountains of the Moon, and tiger hunting in the Punjab.

we collected a representative sample of phones, cameras, and laptops from the SOCOs. Or, more precisely, we pried them out of their reluctant fingers by promising that everything that needed logging or signing would be logged and signed, and that the chain of custody would be maintained yea, even unto the end of days, or the first court appearance—whichever came first.

I gave them most of the options, but left out Bitcoin mining. Because not only would the explanation of why that uses huge amount of power have taken about three hours, but also because I was a bit hazy on the details myself.

We used to wait for our electronics to warm up, now it's our software.

I'm sorry, I couldn't find "a good song" in your music. —Siri

These days Big Brother, or more precisely, your Bratty Techno Uncle, doesn't need an army of paid informers to keep tabs on you. Everybody seems dead keen to take personal responsibility for their own surveillance. So the problem with trying to keep a low profile is that sooner or later you'll have an involuntary encounter with someone who's dying to share your details with the world.

And this was all getting a bit steampunk for my liking. If Jacob Astor turned out to be wearing goggles it was going to go very hard on him indeed.

It is amazing how quickly the kids learn to drive a car, yet are unable to understand the lawn mower, snowblower and vacuum cleaner.

perfluorocarbon

Once they discovered our solar-powered city, tucked high in the Sierra Oriental, I knew that the end was near. Stupidly, they attacked us, like a wild barbarian horde. We slaughtered them with laser beams and heat-seeking bullets. Instead of driving them away, that only whetted their appetite.

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world, and machines - TV, telephone, cars - were still more or less ancillary, and computers were unheard of in everyday life.

Think about how often—before cell phones, before any kind of caller ID—you answered the landline as a child and had to have an exchange, however brief, with aunts or uncles or family friends. Even if it was that five-second check-in, How are you doing, how is school, is your mom around—it meant periodic real-time vocal contact with an extended community, which, through repetition, it reinforced.